I’m Comparing Two Wick Suppliers for Commercial Production — What Should I Record Beyond Melt-Pool Diameter to Determine Which Wick Actually Performs Better?

Why pool diameter can't separate two suppliers

Melt-pool diameter is the natural first measurement, and for choosing a size it is essential. For choosing between two suppliers of nominally the same size it runs out quickly. Once both wicks reach the glass in a given jar, both read "full pool". In our worked example both suppliers' candles reach 61–63 mm in a 63 mm inside by three hours; even the narrowest, 61 mm, is 94% of the surface. Pool diameter has nothing left to say.

What it cannot show is how much heat each wick makes getting there, how cleanly it burns that heat, and how consistent one wick is with the next. Those show up in flame height, carbon, soot and the rate at which wax disappears. And because you will buy hundreds or thousands of these wicks, consistency matters more than any single candle's result. A supplier whose average wick is fine but whose occasional wick runs tall will give you the occasional customer complaint, and you cannot tell which candle on the shelf has it.

This is a different job from checking a new carton from a supplier you already use. If your approved wick suddenly gives smaller flames, comparing the new lot with the old one is the new-carton comparison. Here you are choosing between two sources for the first time, or deciding whether to switch.

Before any burn: the bench inspection

Inspect a whole pack from each supplier, not just the five you will burn. You are looking for two things: whether the two suppliers' "same size" is physically the same, and how much one wick varies from another inside each pack. Record every wick with its pack's lot code.

None of these bench readings is a burn result, and none of them should pick the supplier on its own: a heavier wick is not automatically hotter, and a slightly bent wick can be straightened. They tell you which candles to watch and give you a baseline for the next carton. Any wick that fails straightness or crimp on the bench is replaced by another wick from the same pack before pouring, and the replacement is noted, because how many failed is itself a supplier fact.

The burn record, field by field

Burn every candle in still air, in sessions of about three hours with a full cool-down between, trimmed to the same 5–6 mm before each session. Record the same fields at the same hours for every candle. How you store and code these records over hundreds of tests is the burn-data organisation post; this is what goes into each line.

A worked example of the grams-per-hour line: a candle weighed 148.0 g before a three-hour session and 132.6 g after has burned 15 g, which is 5.13 g per hour. Use the same scale throughout; the CSI scale page states no resolution, so check yours against a known weight before you start. Turning grams into a throw-per-gram score is a different question, answered in the diffusion-or-heat post; here grams per hour is simply a heat and consistency reading.

Running it blind, five wicks per pack

Why five per pack? Fewer than five and a single odd wick dominates the spread; many more and the test stops being affordable for a small business. Five is our judgement, and it is enough to see whether one supplier's range is clearly wider than the other's. If the two ranges overlap and you need certainty, repeat with five more from a second pack of each, which also tests consistency between lots.

Spread within a pack: the number that decides

Here is the worked example behind the diagram. Every reading is illustrative; your numbers will differ. What matters is the shape of the comparison.

On averages alone, B looks only a little hotter than A. On spread, B is a different product: two of its five wicks run near the top of the flame band and burn noticeably faster, and they carry the largest carbon beads. In production you cannot pick the good wicks out of B's box, so the customer who gets wick B4 gets a hotter, faster candle than the one you tested on B1. Supplier A's wicks behave like one wick.

Spread is also why you test in the candle you will sell. A wick that varies a little might be harmless in a jar where it sits mid-range and a problem in a jar where it already runs near the top of the band.

Choosing a supplier from the record

Price comes last on purpose. A wick is one of the cheapest components in a candle: at CSI the C2 is ₹9.44 a wick at every pack size, the same ₹9.44 in a pack of 1,000. A few paise saved on a less consistent wick are lost on the first returned candle. When the comparison is close, ask each supplier how they mark lots and whether one order can come from a single lot; ask us the same. Whether to commit to a thousand wicks once a supplier has won is the 1,000-wick purchase gate; cutting the number of wick SKUs you keep is the SKU consolidation audit.

Ten candles, costed

That is ₹224.28 a candle before the wick. Costs are worked examples and exclude labour, freight, packaging and GST. From nothing, including the scale, the cash outlay is ₹2,996.20. For a jar over 8 cm, swap the C2 arm for five Cotton Braided wicks (₹60.00) and recost the wax and oil for your fill weight. Blue Ocean's 15 g is ₹1.26 a gram dearer than its 100 g, so it is not the economical way to buy for ten candles.

Buying for a supplier comparison

Five items, chosen on page statements, price and stock on 29 September 2026. CSI publishes no wick-performance data, so nothing here is ranked on burn results. If CSI is not one of your two suppliers, you need only the constants: wax, oil, jars and a scale.

Frequently asked questions